Its like a tribe on a pacific island had discovered boolean algebra first, and every time somebody tried to discuss comp science ever after - out of nowhere someone yells "This calls for a ritual, sacrifice the chicken, you cant discuss booleans, without being ridden by baron samedi."
Some kind of lisp with probably terrible interpreter.
The modern neuroscience is of course something like an assembler. So lisp or assembler? If you want to write modern OS, then you know the answer.
The Freud, Jung, Lacan theory is related to psychotherapeutic work is like automata theory relationships to writing modern enterprise applications.
I don't believe there is something 'true' or 'objective' in psychoanalysis - deep inside is some ocean, some chaos of different introjections, emotions and feelings. But the psychoanalysis helps to create structure there, to look and make sense out of the ocean.
There is no substitude for psychoanalysis except really good prose probably or poetry.
And of course Freud was a genius.
Freud was a misogyn and a drug addict, and he proposed a lot of theories that leave modern people scratching their heads. Eg he attributed almost all mental problems to sexuality, coined the ridiculous Oedipus complex, and once called girls „strange little beings without a penis“. Sure, the field was at the very beginning, but why did he always have to bring penises into play?
He happened to found the first thought school for explaining mental illnesses, but most of his ideas have since been accepted to be wrong or way too crude.
All three are totally orthogonal to someone being a genius -- and at least the second is a very puritan concern to level at someone regarding their contributions to science/culture/etc.
>Eg he attributed almost all mental problems to sexuality
And a heck of a lot (of the soft kind, not physiological issues) can be attributed there -- especially since the only real mechanism behind humanity's (and any animals) continued existence, and the closest thing to an "end purpose" for any individual, is reproduction.
>coined the ridiculous Oedipus complex
Nothing ridiculous about it -- and it was not for some irrelevant chance that those kind of relationships and dynamics were studied and concerned civilizations for millennia (including, but not limited nor starting from, the ancient Greek play on Oedipus).
On the other hand, I find arguments based on hard facts naive and ignoring that the interpretation of facts (and the framework for understanding them) is what makes them usable for anything, not their inherent quality.
>> Nothing ridiculous about it
Except that Freud suffered from it himself - he had a thing for his own mother - and then projected his shame onto patients to such an extent that he thought it was the foundation of everyones problems.
The challenge with analysis is that it needs to be done by the patient. Only they can see/hear whats going on in their head.
Based on my limited personal experience as a patient, this is quite insightful.
No medication could solve my issues with depression. What did turn my life around was when I was finally able to get a hold on the cycles that my mind goes through on a regular basis and terminate the feedback loop that leads to despondency for me. Counseling was only useful for me in that it allowed me to consult with someone with much more experience in the field to make sure my own observations of self matched the outward reality.
In my early twenties I believe I experienced a taste of what schizophrenia is, although I was never diagnosed with it. My mind would make connections between ideas that seemed extremely important at the time, but between which no connections actually existed. I developed a habit of taking notes when I get excited about an idea and then going back in a day or two to review them to see if it still makes sense. In the vast majority of cases they don't.
Seeing a common subject, a set of boundaries, a possible (even if incorrect) set of guiding principles, can be genius. If it inspires further exploration or refinement or even rejection of ideas, it's a productive step.
Einstein railed against QM, Newton believed in alchemy, Kelvin though the Earth was 30 million years old, the list of people opposed to continental drift / plate techtonics is vast (see Naomi Oreskes several papers and books on the history of the development of that subject), Samuel Morse had what would now be dispicable views on race and religion, Ford was an anti-semite, Crick and/or Watson have their own failings, etc., etc., etc.
Much of genius is being able to jump out of and beyond the present dominant paradigm and mental models. It's not about being right but of being less wrong. Than that which came before, not after.
Penis envy? Well, I saw myself and read myself about women who desired to castrate their brothers for example because they attributed their envy and jealousy of parental attention to them.
Oedipus issues? Seriously? I believe every other mother or father out there in emotionally incestous relationships with their kids.
Id, ego, superego? It's a model of consciousness, pretty primitive, but still useful. You basically split everything into 3 buckets - e.g. compulsive lust, fetishism goes to id, rational thinking to ego, overresponsibility to superego.
Oral, anal, phallic, etc. stages of development? There were much more better theories by Theodore Lidz and Erickson.
Oh, you are a paranoid schizophrenic. Well, im not going to admit defeat and helplessness- i got a reputation to run here- no Sir, you are eternally afraid for having a shorter wiener then your father. This is genius, yes, but of the marketing kind.
The whole point of this thread is that modern neuroscience is showing us that the classification of schizophrenia in modern terms was not rational either.
It makes sense to work at higher level information, at the level of feelings and dialogue, than at a lower level, e.g. epigenetic circumstances or neuronal metabolic disorders, if one mistakenly overestimates their grasp on the phenomenon.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as "the genes for schizophrenia" - nor would I be so quick to dismiss the skepticism he brought to the preexisting field of analyzing people's problems, just because he became a mythical figure in pop culture to the point that more people have a mistaken view of what he wrote than have read him.
Why did it matter what he wrote? Because there were many things he wrote that made people recognize things in others. Of the things they recognized, what worked either lasted and was retained, or fell out of mode due to people becoming fed up with him as long ago as the 1920s, or served as a benchmark/competition for others to test ideas against to find any that worked better. It really doesn't have much to do with stymying conversation because of cargo cult thinking..
There are such things as psychotic depression and post-partum depression; psychosis is a symptom of severe bipolar mania, etc.
By the way, the concept of schizophrenia first comes up in Emil Kraepelin's realization that bipolar disorder (manic-depression) and schizophrenia ("precocious dementia") are distinct pathologies -- even though they may have similar presentations at times. With this, Kraepelin also inaugurates the idea of differential diagnosis.
Similar in spirit (but less compatible with our contemporary understanding) is Freud's distinction between neurosis and "psychosis", the former being amenable to analysis. I.e. schizophrenia has always been a diagnosis of exclusion.
If people are actually being able to open up schizophrenia into further detail -- well, that's good. But there will always be a diagnosis of exclusion, we'll just euphemize it as "psychotic disorder NOS" or some such.